Tepitown in english

GREAT READ MEXICO CITY'S 'BARRIO BRAVO' REFUSES TO BE CONQUERED

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Why judge Tepito when Mexico
is the Tepito of the world?

In Mexico City a neighborhood without a shadow does not inspire respect, with that in mind, Tepito is known as the barrio bravo (the fierce neighborhood), and it still exists because it resists with its own visual discourse, that is marked as one of the many chaotic epicenters. 

The historical and cultural dimensions of Tepito assure its urban survival; structured like a socioeconomic laboratory, the neighborhood creates formulas and invents prescriptions against the ruinous processes of the system.

In Tepito trades and recycling have always been cultural models of creativity and productivity, while the tarps that cover the Tianguis are the second skin of the neighborhood and the viviendas serve as the neighborhood’s vertebral column.  The tianguis with its admirable economy of resources is as old and complex as the history of the neighborhood. 

In Tepito when need and hunger unite they develop the most unsuspecting and surprising trades that are derived from every generation of technology.  This process assures the social reproduction of the neighborhood due to its culture and informal commerce, which are both characterized by their own form of citizenship and sovereignty.

The market in the Streets of Tepito is an archaeological recovery that recycles the ancestral land of the Tianguis of Tlatelolco.  The tubular structure looks like a skeleton covered in tarps, which signifies the presence of Xipe-Tótec, “Our Mr. Skinned,” the Aztec deity of spring that wanted to feed the people his own skin, like corn that germinates and loses its own skin.   

The ritual of Xipé-Tótec  (Xipehua to skin or to peel; To possessive prefix: our: and Tec the prefix that abbreviates tecuhtli, mr.) represented the change of the earth’s skin that is covered by new vegetation from every agricultural cycle; from this the Mexicas would be able to cultivate corn to feed themselves. 

In front of other places in the city, Tepito expands like a compact rhizomatic community, extroverted and shared in its learning of urban survival with both experience any instinct.  Siempre jugándose el pellejo, con la ley, con la política, con un patrón o con las manos.

In a neighborhood full of many surprises yet lacking in so much, everything is resolved on its streets poniendo una feria de juegos mecánicos o de billetes For that reason the tianguis are one of the most prestigious schools of free business  Walking through the neighborhood and the Tiagnuis of Tepito is like walking through a living museum with an open sky and full of surprising finds—for Tepiteños the informal economy is a modest social fabric against the powerful industry of crime and its delinquent Fordism. 

The potential energy of Tepito’s cultural matrix functions like a motor with its own accumulator and rhizomal articulator of Poles: with large concentrations of employment and services.  Nodes: integrated with means and routes of free movement.  Corridors: the streets and places that connect to the rest of the city.  The neighborhood carpet: with schools, markets, sports facilities, services and vital spaces of identity. 

The old vecindades, the prodigious matrilocalidades that were the vertebral column of the neighborhood, today are neighboring condominiums that specialize in the desmadrificar of Tepito.  Where the tianguis have been converted into the principle economic spark plug, the streets, with the help of social actors hardened through resistance of self-employment, and by proud workers from the social fabric known as tradifas, specialize in defusing the delinquent stigma of the neighborhood. 

The Homo-Tepitecus is more focused on recycling its memory of the neighborhood than the official history now that the globalization is generating a process of socio-cultural change that directly impacts the traditional forms of production, distribution and consumption in the markets and in the informal networks. 

Both artisanal vocations and the commercial sector of Tepito remain and reproduce in a way that confronts globalization, readjusting the tools and actualizing the classical methodology of social sciences to overflow the legal brands with respect to the goods of consumption that have the right of the author.  Before the market economy and the global tianguis, in Tepito, the strongest, the most educated and the most influential people do not triumph, rather the ones who learns to adapt to the segments of the free market best prevail. 

The Tepiteño is a cultural and political entity immersed in an unregulated economy with sufficient attributes to superimpose the neighborhood charisma over its delinquent stigma.  Using art to critically confront the mechanism of the hyper-capitalist system, with a curated project of urban art with visual and plastic works that characterize both the resistance and belonging to the neighborhood where one works hard until nightfall.

Meanwhile, the pre-Hispanic, Tzompantli, Tepito’s saint of death (or Santa Muerte) emerged and left the underworld to wander through the neighborhood.  Sometimes a street fever becomes an epidemic of violence.  Now drugs are becoming the new religion of the youth that sell them, which is worse than if they were spreading a smallpox contagion, gonorrhea, syphilis, or HIV. 

In front of the imagination of chemo, marijuana and cocaine, the Tepiteño knows all of the ways to provide goods to all of the nomadic consumers, for whom Tepito is a para-city and not a para-site. 

Centro de Estudios Tepiteños de la Ciudad de México / MMXIV

World Planning Schools Congress 2006

WPSC-06  Mobile Worksshops – H4

Tepito: The Transformation of a Site of Resistance

      By Alfonso Hernández Cronista of the Barrio of Tepito

What little we have seen of the 21^st century already bears the signs of failed planning. A vital paradox keeps regenerating it, under the sign of the affirmative, leaving no way to articulate it otherwise, nor any means of naming the new reality: that these degraded cities are the consequence of neoliberalism, and of a transmodernism that confounds the replicants who wander their devastated streets.

From the airplane, Mexico City sparkles, another constellation in the urban firmament. Eight blocks from its core, Tepito adds the light of its own social galaxy: its market, its web of neighbors.

As twin to the city’s center, Tepito has done it all and been it all:  a modest indigenous neighborhood, a miserable colonial enclave, slum in the City of Palaces. Since the advent of the economic crisis, it is the market par excellence for everything denied by the laws of economic motion. And though Tepito is not exactly a model neighborhood, it is exemplary for its strength, its spunk, and for its ability to resist, qualities that have made it a geopolitical emblem.

Tepito’s identity problems arise from the fact that it has always been its own protagonist. Dispositions that stem from its earliest origins are present in its attitude, its repertoire of grandmotherly and fatherly concepts, in its devotions, and in its art of conjugating a incomparable vocabulary. When it appears to be still, it is quiet like a compressed spring—as simple and innocuous as a match.

Tepito is a living thing, always at the ready. Since the eagle and the serpent tangled in their struggle to become the national symbol, its dynamic and defining forces are the patrimonial archetype, and the paradigm of mestizaje, conjugating the official metaphysic with the lived reality of lo Mexicano. That is why, in the words Mexico and Tepito, the same three vowels are paired. That is also why Tepito continues to be very well attuned to the city as a whole. It brings together the many Mexicos and places them in a single crucible; it is the hinge that connects the Centro Historico to the pedestrian level, trying again and again to reconnect the spaces that predatory urbanism tends to fragment.

This obstinate barrio we have inherited is no ruin, nor a swathe of separate properties. It is a dense and integrated terrain, one that shows its urban scars and the open wounds of Mexican history, transposed into our strategies for metropolitan survival. Because Tepito is part of the historical process, there is always more to be said about the work it does in each defining moment.

To be sure, Tepito is far from the quaintest expression of the city center. But it makes a serious claim to being the most vital and the most honest. As the visible projection of an authentic popular neighborhood, its scale is faithful to its roots. Its characteristic everyday rhythms are its vocation. They grow from a mature root system. They can be seen in a nuanced style of working in the street, an engineered commerce, the cultural self-confidence with which it revels in its language, and the attitude with which it faces the global market.

This accumulated knowledge makes Tepito is proud of its origins and survival, it puts us at peace with our own process, it makes us clear-eyed about our present and our future. We do not need to antagonize, with violent protest, every government that thwarts our proposals for improving our own neighborhood. But evidence of how destructiveness their tampering is, is on clear display in the Centro Historico, which has been converted, phase by phase, into an interminable social minefield, and throughout Mexico, which is becoming the Tepito of the world.

Despite the impossibility of really mapping the so-called Third World, our relevant context consists of two facts. The first is that the global urban population has surpassed that of the rural world. Second, the informal economies has exceeded the formal. No planning model yet exists that contemplates where all those people might fit, much less how to provide them with basic services. This is especially true in the sprawling webs not officially defined as cities, or in the anonymous urban clusters that cannot really be called neighborhoods.

Former villages have taken on the appearance of urban marketplaces, or melted into a hermaphrodite landscape, neither completely urban nor completely rural. The process of hybridization is advancing according to unknown rules. Researchers either identify them as transitional landscapes—or as the precursors of a dramatically new mode of urbanization. Even as Mexican industry contracts, the pseudopods of what we call the zona conurbada mirror darkly the “edge cities” of the north, both lacking visible means of support.

Even as the cities have ceased to be generators of employment, the policies of IMF, and now the WTO, have forced an agricultural “deregulation” that is a de-peasantization, forcing a new and more complete exodus toward the cities, however they are defined. Mexican agriculture is exposed to the devastating competition from the transgenic prairies of North America. With its sudden swerves, defying the laws of motion discovered by Marx and Weber, the neoliberal world order thwarts all planning. The kind of urban growth that comes with structural adjustment, devaluation of currencies, and cuts to public spending, spells a recipe for the mass production of chaos.

National and international interventions of the last twenty years have increased urban areas and the poverty of cities, intensifying exclusion and inequality, while also undercutting urban elites’ ability to utilize cities as growth engines. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of children and young people in developing countries devote their productive lives to paying the national debts of their countries.

In 2003, the UN’s Habitat Programme published The Challenge of the Slums, the first truly global appraisal of urban poverty. The report brings together a huge range of research on real cities, including China and the former Soviet Union, with concrete data all the way down to the household. The report breaks with the UN’s usual caution and self-censorship to roundly condemn neoliberal policy, particularly the IMF and structural adjustment.

All of this, together with the scientific consensus about global warming, should force us to reframe the planning debates, integrating the themes urbanization, informality, human solidarity, quality of life, and historical agency with a justified alarm about the potential for unknown kinds of urban catastrophe.

The components of the new global urban situation, which Mike Davis is calling a “Planet of Slums” are the products of unique histories, yet at the same time, utterly interchangeable. The same logic takes hold of “bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City.”[1]

Urban planners also speculate about the processes that get woven together in Third World cities to create new and extraordinary networks, flows, and hierarchies. As Davis points out, most of us live in the “gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential theme parks…the bourgeois ‘offworlds’ in which the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves.” The reigning political dynamics in our antipodes, as he aptly generalizes, are the product of global trade as well as historically-conditioned expectations. Confronted with informal sector survivalism, holders of public office tend to tacitly permit irregular settlements and commerce, turning their attention instead to strategies for extracting regular flows of votes, rents, or bribes. This, he correctly predicts, leads to a resurgence of kinds of corporativism whose populist geopolitics are above and beyond all normative mechanisms.

According to displaced urbanites themselves, what probably await these urban areas is an inexorable collapse, of gradually being swallowed by our own agonizing economic process. Forty-five or fifty percent of the total population of the world’s cities is approaching a level of poverty that can hardly produce optimism. In these cities, poverty is ceasing to be a misfortune and is being reclassified as a crime.

Tepitown para-site

All over the world, the IMF, as the administrator of all the central banks, has offered the poor countries the same poisoned chalice, filled with devaluations, privatizations, the gutting of controls over imports, cancellation of food subsidies, forced payments of the full costs of health and education, and the ruthless reduction of the public sector. In Latin America, the eighties deepened the depths and heightened the peaks in a socioeconomic topography already the most extreme in the world. Individuals found themselves obliged to regroup around the collective resources of the household, in the process rediscovering the desperate creativity of women, of university graduates unable to find work, and of the lifelong officially unemployed.

Particularly in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake, informal activities proliferated, and became the active part of a general tertiarization of the economy. Both processes continues in the present. The informal sector has become the main economic sparkplug of the underemployed. The fragile self organization of that sector must compete daily with the booming extractive industry known as organized crime.

In theory, the nineties were going to correct the errors of the eighties and allow Third World cities to recover lost ground and wade across the abyss of inequality created by Structural Adjustment. The pain of adjustment was supposed to come along with the analgesic of globalization.

In reality, the nineties, as The Challenge of the Slums observes, were the first decade in which urban development planning was produced under nearly utopian free market conditions: “instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade.’ ‘The rise of [this] informal sector,’ they declare bluntly, ‘is . . . a direct result of liberalization.”[2]

Since anthropologist Keith Hart coined the term “informal sector” in 1973, a vast literature has arisen to theorize and grapple with questions of urban survival. Its basic consensus is that the eighties reversed the relative positions of the formal and informal sectors, gradually making informal activities the chief mode of livelihood for the majority of urbanites. Informal sector workers represent about two fifths of the economically active population of the developing world. In the opinion of World Bank investigators, the informal economy now employs fifty-seven percent of the Latin American workforce and provides four out of every five new jobs created.

All the national tertiary-informal sectors have been linked, and have unwittingly joined a global Darwinian contested terrain, where each poor population is pitted against all the others. The hierarchization of humanity by late capitalism has already taken place. Everyone loses in the race to the bottom.

In China, the greatest industrial revolution of all has been irreversibly detonated. Its archimedian lever tips a population larger than that of Europe out of the hamlets and down into the cities. China alone among developing countries has the manufacturing power to grab flows of transnational capital equivalent to half of the total invested in the developing world. The criminalization of global informality should not be approached outside this context.

To be honest, the current literature on poverty, and the episodic, disjointed urban social movements, offer very few answers to problems of this magnitude. There are those who question whether poor informal sector workers could ever form a coherent class in itself, much less an activist class for itself. Meanwhile, the new political dynamics are slowly unveiled. Though the urban poor lack stable, predictable structures, their social stage is necessarily the street or the marketplace. These are the territories where they exercise their local power.

Everywhere, the sedimentation of poverties undermines existential security. The economic inventiveness of the poor creates further antagonisms. Reality is challenging social theory to grasp the novelty of a global “residuum” that apparently lacks economic power, at least not any strategic power. This residuum is overwhelmingly concentrated in a sea of popular neighborhoods surrounding the fortified islands of the rich. In the Latin America cities, competition is intensified by immigrants from Asia and their commercial missions. Surplus labor comes up against unprecedented barriers, like this great literal barrier, this high-tech obstruction to the ant migration from Mexico to the United States.

Perhaps there will be a tipping point where the pollution, sprawl, greed, and violence of urban life bulldoze the forms of civility, the gremios and modes of exchange that enable the poor to keep functioning. No one yet knows at what social temperature the cities of misery reach their point of combustion. Or when, victimized by narcotrafficking, prostitution, and protection rackets, something will have to give. Piracy, a cottage industry and a social shock absorber, is given a criminal profile, though it serves as an extension of the society of the spectacle, drawing more people into the public of a new capital that monopolizes intellectual property rights.

In Mexico City, any self-respecting segment of the barriada knows that the metropolis is a both technical and an economic phenomenon. In this onerously stratified city, a surviving traditional pocket like Tepito synthesizes and symbolizes the historical logic of its process and survival throughout its physically, objectively realized social space.

Tepito is one of the neighborhoods that is emblematic of urban resistance, and reverberates the sounds of the city through the theater of its little miseries, but also through the wisdom acquired in its greater misfortunes. We hold up rhizomatic structures that organize a collective subject of experience, one that knows how to spar, using thought-instruments and forms of expression, with the city and with the nation. And whoever else may come.

Tepito has always generated two polarities: one positive, which manifests in the charisma of its local culture; and another negative, which can be seen in the stigma of its marginal criminality. And every day, the charisma struggles to overcome the stigma, though this is not always accomplished.

In this task, the structures of appropriated space has been transposed into rhizomatic nodes, whose web of resistance is a circuit that paradoxically distributes its center over all its parts.  In the structure of a community rhizome, one enters from any direction, because each point connects to all the others, without exterior or endpoint. Tepito’s rhizome extends it far beyond its geographical area. It recharges itself daily as it consolidates its networks.

Our myth, our mito, defends us from the media’s mitote, a pageantry of trouble packed with words and images that the press official propaganda, and political commentators, use as their vehicle. But the truth is that our myth is like the best good bread: because it is very good, becomes both hard and brittle with time. Therefore it should surprise no one that this neighborhood is condemned to keep looking for its own way, and learn to transform itself in order to endure. We have a modus operandi that necessarily entails self-reinvention.

The heart of Tepito nests in a tianguis, an open-air market, full of stalls with multicolor awnings, rolling food stands, mountains of garbage, detouring policemen, improvised dining rooms, and a bumper crop of new, used, discontinued, imported, smuggled, recycled, pirated, and even stolen merchandise, brought together to sell to those who know and use these things best, either at a good price, or charging a tax on naïveté.

Tepitown para-cité

But the traditional home in Tepito was always the vecindad, a kind of tenement built in the colonial period, consisting of tiny apartments around central patios. These became the vertebral column of the neighborhood, and prodigious matrilocalities. Out of necessity, multiple uses of space proliferated and overlapped. Artisan production, commerce, the trades, and just plain hanging out, started in the patios, then spilled out into the streets.

When government, police, or the media attack Tepito, trying to devalue the social standing of those who live here, the Tepiteños counterattack, taking a stand for their origins, and letting their special charisma shine through, turning on its head the mythology that tries to stigmatize them. In this city, the barrio that fails to throw a shadow commands no respect.

To hear it from public officials and academics, Tepito is a disinherited, miserable place. For others, moreover, the commercial potential of its location places it in the category of space-consuming strategic location. That is why Tepito is one the most hotly debated geopolitical topics in the whole city.

It is written that Tepito’s destiny is that no one shall ever believe in destiny: the process, structure, and dynamic never cease to surprise us. Our corollary: Leave nothing to fate. Besides having to confront the realities of fast capitalism—of which the narcotics trade and piracy are only the spearhead—the intensity of this sector pushes through a great deal of money without it ever being notarized by a bank.

Though it may have ceased to be a cradle of champions, Tepito is a nursery for postfordist pochtecas, traders who, like modern Marco Polos, cross borders and travel the world to sample, taste, and make a judgment about what to buy and import. Their stock in trade is precisely the impossible: the essence of what no one has been able to taste; the sum of all that has been denied.

Tepitown Four The City

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The identification of the barrio de Tepito with aggression and chaos derives from an anthropological discourse. To spite it, Tepito continues to pleasure in forms of artistic creation that subvert the very iron cages that would contain it. To view the texture and coloring of its craggy walls is an opportunity to study its histology, its cellular composition. One can take in the attitudes that predominate on the street in the same spirit. To the empathetic observer, they illustrate the dreams, ironies, sadnesses, and spiritual challenges to Homo Tepitecus as he ponders the stereotypes.

To visit this popular neighborhood, and be nourished by the effect it has one’s interior, is to acquire an obligation—unwanted, perhaps, but necessary—to sniff out the fascinating dark side of Tepi-topia, and to perceive how, in this chaotic city, Tepito is one of the epicenters. It is to sense how Tepito is a catalyst that allows identities to be forged in a way that would be impossible given other spatiotemporal coordinates.

Obstinate Tepito has always been characterized as ancient and crude, populated by problems that nonetheless synthesize the city’s collective memory, whose history still hurts, and is still being written. Recycling, artisan production, and ambulant vending are but three of so many hedges against unemployment, hunger, and marginalization, as our ancestral rhizome keeps showing us the path forward.

The greatest and most sustained offensive against the neighborhood came between 1972 and 1982, under the guise of a project called “Plan Tepito” that brought together twelve different governmental agencies. In 1981, the community asked the university community for help putting together a counterproposal—one that later won an award at the UIA—International Union of Architects in Warsaw. International recognition was what ultimately shamed officials into canceling Plan Tepito. 

Tepito’s Tenant Association and the cultural group Arte Acá protagonized the counterproject. The story was made into the documentary Tepito Sí by Sluizer Films of Amsterdam. Later, in 1984, we arranged an artistic exchange with the Populart group of Oullins, France. The groups pooled their talents to paint murals together in both cities. That experience culminated in the 1987 inauguration of Rue Tepito in the Saulaie banlieu on the outskirts of Lyon.

Since then, all proposals nourish the art scene and to protect local artisan productivity have been blocked by successive governments.

Next came the 1985 earthquake, then the technicolor reconstruction imposed by the World Bank, in strict adhesion to what were then all-too-conventional architectural models, designed to crack open traditional urban nuclei. Their absurdity enhanced by shoddy substitute materials, the new dwellings began to crumble from the outset, deteriorating the quality of life, expelling people from their former homes, and adding to the stew of problems we still confront.

An additional factor in the depopulation of Tepito has been that the new condominiums failed to reserve any space for the traditional trades. Artisans ejected from the new monoculture joined the ranks of the petty merchants. The tianguis—the marketplace—increased in size, becoming Tepito’s central and indispensable economic sparkplug, taking symbolic and literal possession of its main streets and controlling the proceeds of those who work there.

As if all that were not enough, in lieu of a well-integrated plan for improvement, local government is now promoting a kilometer-long elevated roadway, a sort of second story above the “B” Line of the Metro and overtop the length of the Eje Uno Norte called Rayón and Granaditas. This in itself twists the normative rules of the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing (SEDUVI) the agency that governs zoning in the area and, the very one that has, curiously enough, defined Tepito as a traditional neighborhood with historic preservation value.

The territory’s historical importance begins with the Siege of Tenochtitlán. In 1521, the hero Cuauhtemotzin entrenched himself precisely here for the last battle. His final message, The Order to Continue Fighting on Behalf of Our Destiny, survives to this day. At his defeat on August 13 that year, the place was named Tequipeuhcan, which means “here the slavery began.” The Tepiteños were henceforth indelibly charged with the strength, the fierceness, and the will to resist that that still show as they continue to defend their place in the sun.

One hundred twenty thousand people lived here in 1982. At the moment, fifty thousand occupy our fifty-seven blocks. There are two thousand five hundred established businesses, and the tianguis altogether includes eight thousand sellers who set up in the public streets. A Sunday bazaar, specialized in antiques and art, concentrates fifteen hundred more in a twelve-block area. A night market with 850 merchants convenes after hours Wednesday and Saturdays to sell shoes at wholesale. Finally, four public indoor markets in Tepito, plus three more in the adjacent Lagunilla, house 2,600 stalls. Taken together, these add up to fifteen thousand four hundred fifty formal and informal economic units. Then, on an average day, a floating population of about two hundred twenty thousand shoppers and lookers comes wandering though.

To be in Tepito and see what it really is, and what it points to, is to hold in mind the most revealing bits of evidence about its hidden workings. How it speaks to you depends in great measure upon the exchange rate for vital attitudes, on the social and cultural capital one can mobilize, and the academic posture one decides to adopt. More than an archive of the city’s past, Tepito is a living, interacting subject of collective experience that makes itself heard in the present, precisely because it persists in a world where everything is still changing so that everything can stay the same.

Esteemed congresistas, the world planning community is facing a very complex situation, one that demands fresh discussion of the very aims of planning itself. Still, we should remember and draw from the sorts of experiences I have described, and to continue stressng the shared values that can reinforce local resources and self-developing sustainable social networks.

Today I ask you, in view of an intimidating scenario, with the creative destruction of planning on one side, and the destructive creativity of historical forces on the other: Why is a place like Tepito necessary? If Tepito did not exist, would someone have to invent it? What work does it do for the city?

Because for us, to be a Tepiteño is not just a way of life, or a way of being: it is a state of mind.

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Alfonso Hernández Hernández was born in Tepito sixty-one years ago. He describes himself as an autodidact. Since 1972, he has been active in groups that defended Tepito and its reputation, and in creating studies and publications to nourish its culture of resistance.

In 1984, he founded the Centro de Estudios Tepiteños, whose archive documents the processes and expressions of the community, and whose projects interpret Mexico City from the perspective of Tepito. He is a card-carrying member of Metropolitan Region’s Society of Chroniclers, and represents the barrio before the city government.

Hernández holds no academic title, but is said to carry out the all tasks of an Hojalatero Social.

[1] Excerpt from “Planet of Slums,” an article published by Mike Davis in New Left Review, March-April 2004 in advance of his 2006 book of the same title. The article can be read in Spanish translation at NLR’s website: www.newleftreview.net/Espanol.shtml

[2] UN-Habitat report The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements, 2003. http://hq.unhabitat.org/

Informal Market Worlds / Center for Urban Ecologies / UCSD / Feb.2012

El mercado de Tepito / Alfonso Hernández H.

Centro de Estudios Tepiteños de la Ciudad de México

Los tepiteños creemos que la estructura rizomática del barrio de Tepito, es la que ha asegurado la supervivencia comercial de su mercado.

En 1521, la primera traza de la ciudad española no incluyó a Tepito, que en su mismo solar nativo fue recuperando y desarrollando su cotidianidad indígena. En 1810, al término de la lucha de independencia, el mercado callejero de Tepito ya competía con los tendajones de los españoles, judíos y libaneses establecidos en casonas del centro de la ciudad, donde tenían monopolizado el abasto de bienes de consumo y de servicios a la clase pudiente.

En 1917, al concluir la Revolución Mexicana, el discurso de los liberales que redactaron la Constitución Política, decían que con este mandato iba a ser repartida equitativamente la riqueza nacional. Sin embargo, al pueblo que luchó por la igualdad de oportunidades, únicamente le dejaron la agricultura de temporal, las artesanías regionales y el pequeño comercio.

Fue así, que, el barrio de Tepito se fue repoblando de familias de todo el país que lo habían perdido todo, y que no traían más que sus costumbres y oficios tradicionales. Desde entonces el mercado callejero de Tepito se convirtió en el ropero de los pobres de la ciudad, llamándosele como La Bola y El Baratillo.

Era  de tal tamaño la actividad artesanal y comercial del barrio de Tepito, que en la nueva nomenclatura de la ciudad, se le llamó Colonia de la Bolsa, por su oferta de trabajo y los empleos que generaba en sus vecindarios y calles, que hasta la fecha llevan el nombre de los oficios que en ellas se ejercían.

La primera ofensiva gubernamental contra el comercio callejero se dio en 1957 con la edificación de cuatro mercados públicos en los que se reubicó a los vendedores. Quienes diez años después volvieron a ocupar sus lugares en las mismas calles donde tradicionalmente y por generaciones comerciaban.

Todo esto se colapsó con el sismo de 1985, pues la reconstrucción siguió las instrucciones del FMI, utilizando modelos de la arquitectura convencional, cuya tipología de vivienda está diseñada para fracturar núcleos urbanos, no dar cabida al taller familiar, e ir deteriorando la calidad de vida del vecindario. Lo cual propició que la actividad comercial se desdoblara, y que La Bola y El Baratillo se convirtiera en un inmenso Tianguis callejero con 10 mil oferentes especializados en la compra-venta de objetos: nuevos, usados, reciclados, importados, de saldo, y otros con el único defecto de que son robados.

En 1995 comenzaron a aflorar las primeras patologías urbanas, derivadas de la tugurización de la vida cotidiana, aunadas a la estrategia de dejar el barrio a su suerte, para que se convirtiera en un santuario de impunidad. Creciendo con ello el estigma delincuencial con el que se nos etiqueta y que estamos combatiendo dando a conocer nuestro carisma barrial.

El mercado de Tepito está en el perímetro “B” del Centro Histórico, cuyo perímetro “A” está siendo gentrificado a favor de la Slim Village, desalojando actividades y comerciantes ambulantes que no quieren o no pueden pagar un local en las que popularmente se les conoce cómo Plazas Maruchan, ironizando el nombre con las sopas instantáneas.

En el ámbito metropolitano, lo que posiciona a Tepito es: su lugar geográfico, su mitología barrial, y su prestigiado laboratorio mixto de economía y cultura; además de su función de barrio-bisagra, reciclando y ensamblándose en todo el acontecer del Centro Histórico de la ciudad.

En Tepito mezclamos lo local, con lo mexicano, y con lo global, reimaginándonos como una tribu urbana posmoderna, alejados del canon nacionalista, para construir nuestro propio imaginario. Y por nuestro proceso mutante, los tepiteños nos identificamos más con lo propio que con lo ajeno, y más con el territorio que con el mapa.

A Tepito se le reconoce por ser uno de los barrios originarios de la ciudad, y aunque los gobiernos no lo califican como un barrio que sirva de modelo, los mexicanos lo identifican cómo un barrio emblemático, por la fuerza, bravura y resistencia con la que nos defendemos.

Nuestro arraigo y pertenencia al mismo solar nativo de aquel México-Tenochtitlan, donde el tianguis de Tlatelolco era el centro de comercio de los aztecas, y en el que entonces Tepito era llamado Mecamalinco, por ser el barrio de los mecapaleros que trasportaban las mercaderías.

Nuestra identidad barrial se identifica por nuestras formas de trabajo y vida propias, por nuestro estado de ánimo, por nuestro modo de ser, y por nuestro estado mental. El lado oscuro de Tepito es su cultura. El TepitOculto.

La matriz cultural de Tepito, es semejante a una escuela de supervivencia, en la que la señora pobreza y la musa callejera, siguen siendo nuestras maestras.

Por eso, en la historia de la ciudad de México, Tepito lo ha sido todo: modesto barrio Indígena, miserable enclave Colonial, arrabal de la Ciudad de los Palacios, y territorio de obstinada resistencia contra el urbanismo depredador.

Con mi intervención, pretendo explicarles cómo nos definimos y entendemos a nosotros mismos, dando a conocer el potencial creativo y productivo de los referentes culturales más representativos de Tepito. Mi barrio, es un acumulador de energía, donde sus calles son conectores sociales para aprender y ejercer oficios tradicionales, donde se inventan fórmulas de reciclaje y se crean recetas de nutriciencia vecinal, contra los procesos arruinadores del sistema…

Desde la historia de Adán, lo escrito por Adam Smith, hasta la venta callejera de Chiclets Adams, hay dos procesos que continuamente se definen y se reproducen paralelamente como trabajo asalariado o enajenado, sin considerar las estrategias, no capitalistas y de supervivencia emergente, de los actores en cada espacio social.

Porque muchas fábricas ya no existen, ahora el trabajo está en todas partes, en la modalidad del autoempleo en la economía informal, que para muchos de nosotros es mejor que la economía criminal. Pues en el barrio, los saberes comunitarios son los que crean los oficios y preservan los servicios, que nos hacen ganar puntos de oportunidad y credibilidad, para ser conocidos y reconocidos, por el modo en que trabajamos en nuestros espacios vitales.

En nuestro nicho comercial, estamos compitiendo contra los bucaneros de la república pirata, contra una misión comercial coreana, y contra el fordismo delincuencial del narcomenudeo.

Los audios y videos piratas que patrocina la sociedad del espectáculo, políticamente funcionan como un amortiguador social, que empobrecen el comercio (porque sus ganancias son en centavos) y que contribuyen a que dejemos de ser pueblo para que terminemos cómo público consumidor.

Es por eso que en el mercado de Tepito, reivindicamos a la economía informal estructurada como una modesta fábrica social contra la poderosa industria del crimen. Ya que el umbral entre ambas fronteras cada día es mas angosto…

Ante las secretas maquinaciones de la economía mundial, lo formal y lo informal evolucionan de manera paralela. Y mientras la política está convertida en una palabra esdrújula, tampoco podemos optar por una explicación o solución en términos económicos.

Y como el ocio es anterior al negocio, en el barrio y en el mercado de Tepito se trabaja del canto del gallo al canto del grillo, comerciando duro hasta que se hace oscuro. Con 62 organizaciones gremiales, constituidas legal y notarialmente como asociaciones civiles, cuyo objeto social es procurar el bienestar social, económico y cultural de sus agremiados.

Dicen algunos historiadores que la revolución del XVIII la protagonizó el ciudadano; la del XIX, el proletario; y la del XX, el consumidor. Y como en nuestro siglo, a mayor crisis aumentará el desempleo y crecerá la economía informal, tenemos que reforzar el andamiaje de nuestra ingeniería comercial para que aguante todos los vaivenes que nos depare el destino. Pues hoy, el valor de las personas se mide por lo que pueden comprar, dándole mayor categoría al consumidor, que al ciudadano.

Para la teología de la prosperidad, es más fácil predicar el fin del mundo, que el fin del capitalismo. Herodoto y Platón enseñaron que la población activa se distribuye en siete grandes apartados, de los cuales, el de los guerreros no es menos importante que el linaje de los comerciantes, por la manera en que asumen la apropiación y producción del espacio..

La gran virtud financiera del mercado informal es que genera dinero que circula en las manos y en los bolsillos de los informales, sin que necesite ser redimido por ninguna institución bancaria tranza.

Nuestra mejor clientela serán los indignados y los quebrados por las crisis recurrentes, que ya no pueden mantenerse arriba del carrusel de la economía dominante. Asumamos nuestro compromiso con ellos y con nosotros mismos.

En el sistema global del dinero, para que NAFTA tenga resultados, tiene que haber una frontera entre lo formal y lo informal. Sin embargo, la reproducción emergente de los mercados populares, con sus múltiples estructuras invisibles, comparten la información y el conocimiento para preservar su cultura, su economía, y su capital social.

Para muchos investigadores que estudian mucho, pero que saben poco, y cuyo dialecto académico se llama: teoría. Tratar lo informal les parece algo nostálgico y exótico; sin considerar que la informalidad se ha convertido en un proceso de búsqueda y experimentación de soluciones de la clase popular, frente a las crisis recurrentes.

La economía de los desechos está impulsando el re-uso y el re-ciclaje, para que deje de ser para-site y se transforme en para-city. Por eso, la economía del empleo asalariado y la del autoempleo, convergen en la economía del trabajo formal e informal; dependiendo desde que lado se le quiera ver y considerar.

El mercado informal es el único que oferta objetos y servicios derivados de los oficios tradicionales. Es por eso que el mercado de Tepito existe porque resiste, porque está articulado a un barrio, porque forma parte de un proceso histórico y porque recupera la creatividad y el valor del trabajo local.

Todo esto que llaman informal, antes que a otros, a nosotros corresponde ponerle sus apellidos paterno y materno. Porque lo informal ya es nuestra nueva forma de ciudadanía y de soberanía frente a la economía del mercado global.

Nuestras ideas, y nuestros propios sistemas, son los que preservan la vida útil de los objetos, y la resurrección de los mismos, estructurando nuestro propio modelo de trabajo en la economía informal. El mercado informal es el que está logrando la especialización del sector terciario de la economía, porque ahora el trabajo ya está en todas las calles.

Made in USA / Made in Japan / Made in China / Made in Street


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The Vita-migas of Tepito

Alfonso Hernández Hernández

Centro de Estudios Tepiteños, Mexico City

In the history of Mexico City, the Tepito neighborhood has seen it all and been it all: modest indigenous barrio, miserable colonial enclave, central slum of the City of Palaces, and cultural watering hole of the modern metropolis.[i]

Just eight blocks from the UNESCO-anointed Historic Downtown, Tepito has always been known as the mess hall of the streets and the wardrobe of the masses, where the poor can dress themselves and be fed at prices within the reach of every wallet.

The city is intimate with Tepito, and Tepito is one of its emblems: the part stands for the whole, and vice-versa. They are united by the basic survival instincts that they share, in the face of every urban process, from real estate speculation to the imposition of stigmas. Tepito has learned to recycle certain stigmas, like the label of criminality, and make them over into a kind of charisma. It have grown resistant to anti-barrio viruses by preserving its own ways of organizing work, daily life, and even its own urban dialect. The verbal art of the albur, a play of double and triple meanings, is our game of three-dimensional chess, played on the run. By conjugating words in irregular ways, we multiply their possible meanings and address them to the agile listener.

Tepito is the last stand of uses of urban space that were once widespread in Mexico City. Like other neighborhoods that dated from the colonial period, it was once composed mainly of a kind of tenement called a vecindad, a large construction organized around a courtyard. During the the Mexican Revolution, and throughout the twentieth century’s recurring economic crises, Tepito’s low rents allowed people to modify the old vecindades. Subdivided to accommodate many families, these became prodigious, self-employing matrilocalities, niches of possibility for innumerable trades and workshops of urban artisans. Cooking and childrearing and crafts of all kinds filled the inner patios, then spilled out through the massive front gates. The sidewalks and the street were ideal for makeshift market stalls. Taken together, the mazes of tented stalls f formed what in Mexico is called a tianguis, an removable open air market.

Tepito’s fame for repaired used items was such that people from all over the growing city came to shop at its second-hand tianguis, which was called El Baratillo, derived from the word for “cheap.” There, you could find the best selection of recycled goods. A small industry was dedicated to taking apart and reassembling small appliances like electtric irons, supplied by an army of peddlers called ayateros who walked the streets of the city trading cheap pottery for castoffs. Tepito’s tailors replaced the collars and cuffs of fine used shirts, and specialists called “turners” took apart good used suits, turned the pieces inside out, and resewed them so that they looked brand new. Shoes and boots were similarly ‘turned’ to extend their useful lives.

Entrepreneurs were just as glad to varnish furniture to make it look antique as they were to fix appliances. Given the constant contact with materials and the need to invent repair techniques for every conceivable kind of out-of-order junk, traditional artisans evolved into industrial-age wise men without education. Their reputations as chingones[ii] was always at stake; everything that came out of their workshops had to be in working order.

Like the ayateros who travelled gathering broken appliances, there were also those Tepiteños who followed their routes gathering bones from butchers’ shops, stale bread from bakeries, and leftovers from the restaurants, collected in buckets, all to be resold back in the barrio. The latter were called escamochas, and were served up in wax paper. In the 1950s, a serving cost you twenty cents, and if you were lucky you might get a piece of steak or part of a fish, along with spaghetti, at the cost of having to fish out the occasional cigarette butt, toothpick, or napkin.

As Tepito’s tianguis grew more busy, survival-oriented women struck out to sell all sorts of cheap snacks called tentempié to tide over shoppers and craftspeople to mealtime. They drew on the survival foods they knew best. Though their commercial possibilities expanded with the tianguis, the history of their trade was longer, and had to do with the quintessential indigenous drink called pulque.

Pulque, a beverage made of the fermented juice of the agave, has been produced in Mesoamerica since long before the Spanish arrived, and was very widely consumed in Mexico City well into the second half of the twentieth century. Soon after the Second World War, in the midst of middle-class fears about public drunkenness and the specter of violence against the well-fed, the government imposed a series of controls on the commercialization the drink. Merchants who brought it into the city, mainly from agave-growing areas to the north, had to pay tariffs at  checkpoints where the main roads approached the city center.

Tepito’s proximity to the northern pulque customs checkpoint led to a proliferation of special cantinas called pulquerías along its streets, often two or three to a block. Pulque consumption functioned as the social shock absorber of the masses. Outside the pulquerías, market women installed themselves to sell snacks to the drunks: tacos and quesadillas, boiled eggs, fried entrails of beef or pork, but also migas and chilaquiles.

In times of scarcity, the grandmothers of Tepito always took charge of recycling leftovers, most of which were tortillas and bread. Both harden after a few hours, so they became the basis of two important dishes: chilaquiles and migas. Chilaquiles, which are prepared throughout Mexico, are made by frying torn-up stale tortillas, and then stewing them in a sauce of red or green tomatos and hot chile peppers, and ideally also cilantro, onion, and garlic. It is a homey dish best enjoyed with a spiced coffee.

Migas, in contrast, are not widely eaten and are often viewed with some contempt not only as a poor people’s food but as something slimy. It is nothing other than stewed old bread. Crumb soup. The base comes from boiling cracked hambones to release the marrow, along with garlic, onion, cascabel peppers, and a herb called epazote. As the ingredients ooze together, they make a highly reheatable gelatinous pottage improved at each serving by adding lime juice and oregano to taste.

In Tepito, despite the odds, time gave the upper hand to the migas. They had a high caloric value and were sometimes the only meal of the day. Many people claimed that there was no other food that could restore a drunk’s energy after a long pulque drinking session. Thus it was that, to combat the effects of the pulque, habitual consumers prescribed themselves a big bowl of migas just where they were prepared, seasoned, and served the best. And for those who weren’t regular pulque drinkers, it was still an economical meal, even when ordered with a bone, for savoring the marrow and bits of meat it still carried. 

Those who appreciate a good bowl of migas praise them as a dose of “vita-migas,” a nutritional supplement that make them feel strong, audacious, brave. The proof of this is that they are able to walk home or even to work, no matter when. In the more affluent times that came with the boom in fayuca—goods smuggled in from abroad, during Mexico’s period of Import-Substituting industrial policy—the dish acquired new significance. Tepito’s baratillo market respecialized in fayuca, and as it enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, people took new pride in the cultural forms of necessity. It was in this context that certain migas sellers gained fame for their high quality and authenticity. This is the case with the establishment called “Migas ‘La Güera,’” which after four decades in the heart of Tepito is now treasured by a third generation, whose motto is: “our quality is the result of care, and not a coincidence.”

With time, the pulque trade has been displaced by the popularity of bottled beer. Still, migas  are in vogue in the old-fashioned cantinas, and besides being the favorite food of drunks, they have become a nostalgia dish for the connoisseurs of the barriada.

The owner of “Migas La Güera,” José Luis Frausto, travels every evening to the ham dealers of the meat packing district, where he buys about 100 kilos of bones. He and his team set them to boil through the night, so that in the morning the base is ready. A dish of migas contains the equivalent of about two dinner rolls. A big cracked bone to suck on is optional. On an average day, the restaurant seats about 250 parties, between nine in the morning and closing at 3:00 in the afternoon.

The cost is just thirty pesos, and according to the size on the bone and the assiduousness of the diner, the meal can easily last forty-five minutes. Customers tend to be couples and families, either former Tepiteños passing along the tradition to children not being raised the barrio, or those whose family traditions have included shopping trips to Tepito for generations.

Though the official emblems of Mexico City are monuments like the Angel of Independence, the obstinate barrio of Tepito stands as a symbol of the raza, the people, for whom the hunger pang is a historical memento, poverty is a shove toward a better future, and the present is best left to the chingada[iii].

In the face of a predatory urbanism that devours the oldest barrios, Tepito cultivates a tough, even macabre image: in any large, chaotic city, a neighborhood that casts no shadow commands no respect. And though Tepito doesn’t pretend to be a model barrio, it can legitimately claim to be exemplary for its [aguerrida] defense of its place in the sun. The genome of its identity was structured from the beginning around its hinge with the Historical Downtown.

This history does not cease to bowl over absentminded academics who come to study urban marginality using trashy conceptual parameters. They are taken by surprise by Tepito’s dynamism, which launched itself from its ascribed status as “redundant” to take charge of spaces of informality created by the contradictions of formal economy. We make it go by giving providing everything it lacks, and as a consequence, we appear to threaten it. But what survives is the philosophical attitude summed up by the motto “eat well, fuck hard, and show your balls to Death herself.”[iv]

Tepito’s fate is carved out by fact that we leave nothing to fate. Every day we apply the total of our accumulated knowledge with a passion that arises all by itself, without ever falling into the temptation of coronating any particular concrete achievement. Tepito knows how to not make itself into a target, but remains still (like a spring) and ready (like a match).

Tepito today can be characterized as the historical reserves of a postmodern tribe that fights fiercely to protect its own future, at the risk of appearing as the black sheep in the middle of the urban flock. Its activity and productivity contrast with the aggressive representations of it in the mass media. The sheer volume of vital possibility that Tepito generates has as it result a multiplicity of forms of work and life that adapt to every niche and resource. It hardly seems possible that its small territory can contain so much energy.

The everyday life of the barrio bravo is fully immersed in the tumultuous experience of having to try to subvert every wave of brutal change. It is defined by everything it transgresses, which is the curse and yet the heart of its legend.

Walking the streets of this obstinate barrio, few will detect its underlying cultural rhizome, which guides the constant remaking inside and outside its boundaries. Dare to get to know Mexico: visit Tepito! Try the migas and see why our persistence never quite fits into academic histories.

ETHNOLOGY / University of Pittsburgh / Spring 2008  Volume  XL VII   Number 2 (pp.89-93)

AN  INTERNATIONAL  JOURNAL  OF  CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL  ANTHROPOLOGY                   

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